rata lived in the shape of a most respectable and pious domestic; his lighting the inseparable pipe; his question, "Betty, do you love the Lord Jesus Christ ?" her answer, "I hope, sir, I do ;" and his succeeding and conclusive query, " Betty, do you love me?" These were eccentricities. But there is one darker and more delicate passage in his history, to which we may passingly refer. The partition which, in his case, Nature had made thin between genius and derangement, at length burst asunder. The majestic orb of his intellect librated, wavered, wandered, went utterly out of its course, and "yet the light that led astray, was light from heaven." Hall's was no vulgar frenzy, no grinning, howling, and cursing mania; it was cometary in its character, meteorous, sublime. It brought out his faculties into broader and more vigorous play. The burning hand of madness laid on his brain, did not sear up, but kindled his powers into lurid life. In the language of Lamb, applied to "Lear," " the storm of frenzy turned up, and laid bare that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches." He thought incessantly; all that he had read or knew, came back streaming, rushing, like a tempest through his soul. The sun of his judgment, in health so vigorous and clear, was in eclipse; but, in its stead, "glared the crested hydra" of imagination round the sultry solitudes of his soul. He jested bitterly, as we have seen; declaimed powerfully. He preached magnificent sermons,-would they had been caught from his foaming lips! He prayed fervent, unearthly prayers; and we can conceive no sight more affecting or more awfully grand, than that of this lofty spirit conversing with God through the cloud of madness; amid the eclipse of reason, still groping toward heaven; praying, shall we say, as an angel would pray, were his glorious faculties unhinged, by gazing too nearly and too ardently at the Shechinah! And if even a poor creature, like Christopher

Smart," who indeed," says Johnson, "went to the tavern, but was always carried home again," could, in an asylum, and with a key on the wall, write poetry almost as grand as Job or David: if Nat. Lee soared into sublimity, as he wrote his insane tragedies by the light of the moon; if every clown be a Shakspeare in his dreams; if the speeches of ordinary men, in the brief and bright frenzy preceding the darkness of death, have far exceeded their capabilities in the day of health; if dramatists, and poets, and novelists, have dug some of their richest gems out of the mine of madness, and made their Lears and Ophelias, and Clementinas, and Eustace Grays, talk an eloquence which has hardly a parallel in the written language of men; how vivid must have been the impressions, and how eloquent the ravings, in such circumstances, of such a being as Hall! It is a subject for the noblest painting or poetry; it is a subject for solemn reflection, for humble searchings of heart, for pity, and for tears. In the supposed necessary nearness of "great wit" to madness, we do not believe; but much less can we subscribe to Elia's paper on the sanity of true genius. The truth lies between. Frequently, we are afraid, frenzy lurks in the neighbourhood of a lofty mind, like a lion near a fount, waiting the moment for its fell spring. But that the workings of noble faculties always near the abhorred brink of insanity; that the towering sons of men are most apt to be crowned and "maned" with the fire of madness,-we shrink from supposing. Still less do we think that, in Hall's case, it was designed as a thorn in the flesh to humble his pride. This is a mere assumption, intolerable in worms. Who told them to cry out "a judgment, a thorn?" Let us check our unbridled speculations, stifle our senseless curiosity, be humble, and look at home. Hall himself continued to look back upon this period with a certain melancholy and regretful interest. His mind

then, he averred, had exhausted itself. Obliged to keep up with his fire-winged frenzy, how could it but be crippled ? His memory had been overstrained. His imagination, especially, had suffered. He had come out from the cloud, not with face shining, but with locks shorn. Much of his strength had departed, if he had not become weak as other men.— Others said that, on the contrary, he was bettered by the affliction, and that his preaching improved in beauty and unction, if the power and splendour of his ancient manner were for ever gone.

Alas, that, after all, his warmest admirers must admit that he has left behind him so little which can convey to posterity an adequate idea of his powers! Indolence; a sort of frantic fastidiousness; the pain produced by a calculus inserted on his spine, and which no power of opium or ether could deaden; not to speak of his love of talk, the undisputed pre-eminence he enjoyed among his brethren, and the soft flatteries which were constantly steaming up around him from the tongues of females, males, and mannikins, composing the small coterie over which he was content to preside, (he who could have shone a dictator in the loftiest literary circles,) besides the drain which two fits of frenzy made upon his mind, all combined not only to prevent him writing oftener, but to deaden and enfeeble him when he did. Hence, the most eloquent preacher and finished author of his age, must be judged hereafter from fragments and fugitive pieces, and the testimony of personal friends, and the breath of floating reputation, instead of having enshrined his soul, as he could and should have done, in some great theological, or ethical, or literary work. Still he may, without hesitation, be pronounced one of the most remarkable men of the age. The place which he occupies in public estimation, is not likely to narrow materially, but

will probably enlarge. His works may be proclaimed imperishable as the language in which they are written, and to the beauty and perfection of which they have so much contributed; and praise enough we count it "to fill the ambition of a private man," that his language is our mother tongue.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

THE most extraordinary beings, as imaginative objects, who ever appeared upon this planet, were the prophet bards of Israel. Mark one of those wondrous beings, in his most perfect character! He was a solitary and savage man, residing with lions when he was not way-laying kings, on whose brow the scorching sun of Syria had charactered its fierce and terrible hue; and whose wild eye swam with a fine insanity, gathered from solitary communings with the original forms of nature ;-the sand, the sea, the mountains, and the sky; as well as with the light of a Divine afflatus. He had lain in the cockatrice's den; he had put his hand on the hole of the asp; he had spent the night on lion-surrounded trees, and slept and dreamed amid their hungry roar; he had swam in the Dead Sea, or haunted, like a ghost, those dreary caves which lowered around it; he had drank of the melted snow on the top of Lebanon; at Sinai he had traced and trode on the burning foot-prints of Jehovah; he had heard messages at midnight, which made his hair to arise and his skin to creep; he had been wet with dews of the night, and girt by the demons of the wilderness; he had been tossed up and down like a leaf upon the strong and awful storm of his inspiration. He was essentially a

lonely man, cut off, by gulf upon gulf, from all tender ties and human associations. He had no home,—a wife he might be permitted to marry, but the permission, as to Hosea, might only be a curse; and, when her death became necessary, as a sign, as in the case of Ezekiel, she died and left him in the same austere seclusion in which he had existed before. The power which came upon him, cut, by its fierce coming, all the threads which bound him to his kind,-tore him from the plough or from the pastoral solitude, and hurried him to the desert, and thence to the foot of the throne, or to the wheel of the triumphal chariot. And how startling his coming to crowned or conquering guilt! Wild from the wilderness, bearded like its lion lord, the fury of God glaring in his eye, his mantle heaving to his heaving breast; his words stern, swelling, tinged on their terrible edges with poetry; his attitude, dignity; his gesture, power; how did he burst upon the astonished gaze, how abrupt and awful his entrance, how short and spirit-like his stay, how dreamily dreadful the impression made by his words, long after they had ceased to tingle on the ears, and how mysterious the solitude into which he seemed to melt away! Poet, nay, prophet, were a feeble name for such a being. trumpet filled with the voice of God-a chariot of fire carrying blazing tidings-a meteor kindled at the eye, and blown on the breath of the Eternal!

He was a

And how strange it is, that Percy Bysshe Shelley, of all the modern poets, with the exception of Coleridge in his youth, reminds us most of Israel's prophets. His was a burdened soul: he was the mere organ of the message he bore; and, like one of Ezekiel's wheels, his being moved in the might of an invisible spirit. And it is as much for the sake of his wild sincerity, as for his genius, that, deeply as we disapprove of his theoretical sentiments, we have